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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-become-idiots-the-ai-cheating-scandal-roiling-brown-university/ [arstechnica.com]

Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don’t need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can’t be done by a chatbot.
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A recent survey of Princeton students [arstechnica.com] found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment.
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In just the last week, Serrano—who was born in Spain—has told his story to El País [elpais.com] and Inside Higher Ed [insidehighered.com], which have both run significant pieces on the scandal.

The story that Serrano told them begins in December 2025, when a gunman attacked Brown’s campus [wikipedia.org] and killed two people
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Shaken by the experience, Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students.
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“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

Beyond the numbers, many of the answers, even when correct, felt slightly off. They had a “very convoluted style,” Serrano said. When he and his grad students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT, they received similar results.
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He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.
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As a university, Brown is grappling with hard questions about AI use at the moment. It recently released a provost-led report [brown.edu] (PDF) on “Generative AI in Teaching and Learning,” which found that it’s not just professors who have concerns.
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Serrano shares those concerns, and he wants universities as a whole to stand up for human thought. That’s why he’s not letting this story go
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“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,”
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“We cannot choose to become idiots.”

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